Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain

11 Moved by the Movies

11 MOVED BY THE MOVIES Of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema. — Lenin was correct in predicting that the cinema would be an important medium for indoctrinating people, but the father of the Soviet state could not have foreseen the influence that foreign films would have on the Soviet public. From foreign films Soviet audiences learned that people in the West did not have to stand in long lines to purchase food, did not live in communal apartments, dressed fashionably , enjoyed many conveniences not available in the Soviet Union, owned cars, and lived the normal life so sought by Russians. As Thomas L. Friedman has pointed out, that had unforeseen consequences: “The single most underestimated force in international affairs today is what happens —thanks to globalization—when we all increasingly know how everyone else lives. People everywhere start to demand the same things, and when they can’t get them, they get frustrated.”1 Soviet audiences saw Western films as a window on another world, and they indeed got frustrated. Through foreign films Russians were able to see aspects of life in the West that invalidated the negative views promulgated by the Soviet media. Audiences were not so much listening to the sound tracks or reading the subtitles, as watching the doings of people in the films—in their homes, in stores, on the streets, the clothes they wore, and the cars they drove. One Russian woman recalls how, on seeing The Apartment, starring Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon , she was impressed by watching Lemmon warm up his TV dinner, unknown at that time in the Soviet Union, and lighting his kitchen stove without a match. And when refrigerators were opened in Western films, they were always full of food. Such details, which showed how people lived in the West, were most revealing for Soviet audiences. When they saw films about Westerners and their problems , their reaction was, as one Russian put it,“I wish we had their problems.” U.S.-Soviet film exchanges have a long history, going back to  when D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance was shown in the Soviet Union under the title, The World’s Evil, although in an edited version which deleted the Christ’s Passion episode.  . Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, June , . That was the start of the Soviet practice of doctoring foreign films to conform with ideology, a practice continued in the ensuing years.2 In the years following World War I, the Soviet film industry was nascent, and foreign films were imported to meet the entertainment needs of the masses. From  to ,  American films were purchased, mostly silent films by D. W. Griffith , Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Cecil B. DeMille, Eric von Stroheim, and Buster Keaton. Soviet audiences also thrilled to the adventures of Tarzan and Zorro, and the most popular matinee idols of those years in Soviet Russia, surpassing even Soviet film stars, were Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks , and Conrad Veidt.3 During the s, however, when the Soviet film industry began large-scale production, only a few American films were purchased. World War II brought a new need for entertainment, and showings of American films resumed with such hits as Bambi, The Thief of Baghdad, The Three Musketeers , The Jungle Book, and Charlie’s Aunt, all of which enjoyed great success. In the immediate postwar years, American films were again shown to Soviet audiences, the so-called trophy films captured by the Red Army from film archives in Berlin and other European capitals. The films were subtitled, credits were deleted, titles were changed, and the films were shown without compensation to their American producers, which was of no concern to the audiences, who enjoyed them immensely. However, conflict between the U.S. and Soviet film industries over those pirated showings led to a suspension of film sales until  and the signing of the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement. During the years of the cultural agreement, four or five American films, on average, were purchased by the Soviets each year. Most were pure entertainment —comedies, adventure stories, musicals, and science fiction—which met the interests of Soviet audiences. Among the more popular were Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, The Chase, and Tootsie. Also purchased, however, were films of social protest and realistic portrayals of contemporary American life which Soviet propagandists considered ideologically correct in portraying the ills of capitalist society . Many of those films, however, were made in the social protest tradition of American...